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Thomson Resources painting detailed picture at Texas Silver District with Twin Hills resource estimate in the works
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A detailed picture is beginning to emerge of the scale and potential of Thomson Resources’ Texas silver district, with JORC 2012 resources expected to be unveiled at all major deposits by the end of the March quarter.
And Thomson (ASX:TMZ) is not just painting by numbers; it’s working hard to review and validate a database of historic exploration results to come up with a new model for its Twin Hills deposit.
A mineral resource estimate for the Twin Hills silver-gold deposit is well advanced, with estimates also expected this quarter from the Silver Spur and Mt Gunyan deposits.
Thomson’s geoscience consultants have completed a mountain of work at Twin Hills, completing a detailed geological map of the pit area, relogging over 300 historic drill holes and 25 core samples to build a new geological understanding of the Twin Hills deposit.
Significantly, Thomson has identified a high grade core not recognised in previous interpretations.
Highlight intersections amid 21,000m of historic drilling include:
- 36m at 180.2g/t Ag and 0.42g/t Au from 66m (6,486 Ag grams per metre at a 25g/t Ag cut off), including:
- 22m at 267.9g/t Ag and 0.61g/t Au from 66m (5,894 Ag g/m, 90g/t Ag cut off); and,
- 32m at 210.1g/t Ag and 0.37g/t Au from 32m (6,724 Ag g/m, 25g/t Ag cut off), including:
- 10m at 457.0g/t Ag and 1.05g/t Au from 48m (4,570 Ag g/m, 90g/t Ag cut off).
Not just a ‘rubber stamp’
Thomson Resources executive chairman David Williams said the company had worked hard to build up a robust picture of the resources at the highly promising Texas silver district.
He said the company is not just “rubber stamping” old statements to get through the work quickly.
“Within the Texas District we have made a point of not taking the simple path of ‘rubber stamping’ previously published MREs,” he said.
“Instead we have gone back to scratch and completely reviewed and validated the database of historic exploration results in order to provide us with a complete and well informed picture of what we have and where the potential lies to increase the MREs.
“This was accompanied by extensive relogging of all samples, including some reassaying, and geological mapping.”
While it has leveraged millions of dollars in investment from previous owners, Thomson has not been willing to just accept the models of prior operators.
Its aim is to add to the historic success of the silver, gold, lead, zinc and copper district, which has delivered past production of 4.2 million ounces of silver, 690 tonnes of zinc, 1,050 tonnes of lead and 990 tonnes of copper.
“We made the decision not to accept prior operators’ models and have developed our own conclusions with a large amount of additional work required to fill the gaps in metallurgical understanding – key to ensuring not only that these deposits can be processed, but that they can be processed with the other Projects,” Williams said.
“This work has highlighted the higher-grade centre of the Twin Hills deposit.
“This has all taken time but has provided us with a much better understanding of what is going on in this district and a very robust database for the MREs to be defined from.
“We make no apologies for this as this reflects our commitment to progressing the New England Fold Belt Hub and Spoke Project into development in a commercially sustainable and long-term way.”
A mineral resource estimate is also being planned for the high grade Webbs silver-base metals project in the New England Fold Belt Hub and Spoke project.
New model opens doors to discovery
Metallurgical test work at Twin Hills is nearing completion and is due to be reported in the next few weeks.
Just 25% of the known sulphide deposit was previously mined and processed through a heap leach process that only delivered 60% recoveries.
Thomson is aiming to define a metallurgical process that will enable it to deliver a central processing facility at its New England Fold Belt Hub and Spoke project with much higher recoveries.
The explorer says the new geological model of the Twin Hills deposit and understanding of its formation can also be used to help target discoveries at Twin Hills and other targets in the district under cover.
“Targeting similar settings along the Stokes Fault zone and other like settings within the Texas Project with geological mapping and with electrical geophysics and geochemical sampling, has a strong probability of delivering discoveries of additional silver-gold base metal mineralisation,” the company said.
This article was developed in collaboration with Thomson Resources, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
